


Of How Hard We Tried

by dilangley



Category: SEAL Team (TV show)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-30
Updated: 2017-09-30
Packaged: 2019-01-07 05:31:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12226743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dilangley/pseuds/dilangley
Summary: The air conditioner is out, and Jason can't manage to fix it. Or anything else, apparently.Or how Jason Hayes ended up sleeping on Ray's couch between missions.





	Of How Hard We Tried

**Author's Note:**

>  
> 
> _"I am getting nowhere with you. I can't let it go, and I can't get through..._  
>  Both hands. Please use both hands. No, don't close your eyes.  
> I am writing graffiti on your body.  
> I am drawing the story of how hard we tried."
> 
>  
> 
> _\-- Ani DiFranco, "Both Hands"_  
> 

The night she asked him to leave, her wedding dress hung over the foot of the bed, massive in its zippered sheath, like a body bag in white.

“You cleaning?” Jason asked as he walked through the bedroom door, unlaced boots still on his feet and a Budweiser sweating in his right hand. “In this heat?”

Alana knelt on the closet floor, surrounded by boxes unearthed from the bottom of the closet, and hardly looked up when he spoke. Her shirt clung to her back, damp clear through. The air conditioner had been out for two days. Jason had spent hours working on the damn thing, frustration spiraling up his spine with every passing minute. He could command a team, pack a go-bag in under a minute, deliver a clean kill from 600 yards, but he couldn’t get the HVAC system in his house to deliver cold air in the middle of this heat wave.

Then, at the first sign of progress, he had been called in to hear his new commanding officer -- a desk jockey who had played the right political cards but had never seen Tier 1 action -- announce psychiatrist appointments for everyone. Everyone knew the word everyone meant _you, Jason Hayes, you. You were in charge when your buddy died. You are the one with bags under your eyes and a new tick you can’t control. You’re the guy who needs a weekly reminder that you’re now a guy whose brain is in question._

“I’m not cleaning. I’m getting a load ready for the Salvation Army.” She didn’t turn around.

Jason looked at the scrapbooks on the floor around her, handmade mementos of the time when those had been all the rage.

“The Salvation Army wants our pictures of Michael’s first steps?”

Now Alana turned, and the wildness around her eyes caught him off-guard. Her face, thin and haggard, seemed to have fallen in on itself, a flower after too many days in a vase on the kitchen table. She looked at the scrapbooks herself, as if startled by their presence, as if she had possessed no awareness of her own task.

“No. Not those,” she murmured. She picked one up, touched the edge. “I got carried away.”

Jason walked over to the wedding dress and unzipped it six inches, just enough to let a puff of lace slip through the hungry teeth. He remembered Alana in the dress still, twenty-two and bright-eyed and so happy to get down the aisle to him that she let go of her father three feet early and tumbled straight into his arms.

“Am I Mrs. Hayes yet?” She had teased in his ear.

Jason rezipped the bag and took a long, low sip of his beer. It tasted like the start of a long night.

“Want me to help you put everything back together?” 

“Yes.” Her voice broke. Her lower lip quivered as she repeated his words. “I do want you to help me put everything back together.”

His stomach dropped.

“I want…” She kept going as she stood up. “I want you to be at Michael’s baseball games and Emma’s recitals. I want you to go to the library and pick out the latest David Baldacci book to read on the back porch, and I want you to crawl into bed beside me not a couple times a month but every damn night and to stay there until morning, not get up at two because you can’t sleep cooped up in a bed.”

“Alana…” Exhaustion, sudden and overpowering, made it hard to even get her name out.

She didn’t slow a bit though, her trembling rant pushing on. “I want you to retire. We’ve given enough for our country. You’ve given enough ten times over. Uncle Sam can’t have any more of me. I’ve got nothing left.”

“Alana…”

“And the thing is, I know it. I do. I know that you’re not going to retire. I’ve wanted you to do it for years, to go civilian, but I’ve never asked because I knew you would say no. But now, with what happened to Nate… I have to ask, even though I know you’re going to say no. I have to ask just to say I tried.”

She stared him down, sea-glass green eyes shiny with unshed tears, and he wished he could do something besides stand there woodenly.

“I’m not going to retire.”

“I know.” She whispered it, her face breaking into a smile that held no joy. She stepped forward, took both of his hands in hers. He grabbed tight, broken from his trance by her touch, and released by his reaction, one of her tears fell down her cheek.

He squeezed her hands tighter, looked down to the see her slim wedding band pressing into the white skin.

“I love you.” His voice sounded nothing like itself, ragged and too aggressive, too desperate. “I love you.”

“I love you, Jason. I will always love you. But I can’t do this anymore.” She tilted her head to the side, bit her lower lip, but she could not catch the truth now that it had been set free. “I want you to move out.”

She had delivered the kill shot he hadn’t seen coming, and he waited a few searing seconds for his heart to pump blood through the severed artery. He would bleed out. Injuries like this didn’t linger. You died before you felt it. You died eyes and mouth gaping open. 

Except Alana hadn’t actually shot him. That would have been a mercy.

Instead he kept on breathing and had to come up with something to say to the woman standing in front of him who didn’t seem to want to be his wife anymore.

“I just need to time to make some plans and figure some things out. I’ll tell the kids it was my decision.” 

Had she been talking to the whole time? He noticed he had let go of her hand, that he was rubbing the nonexistent mark on his outer thigh.

He wanted to get angry with her, pick up the wedding dress and shake it at her. _Remember this? Remember those promises? I need you._ But he looked at her, really looked at her for the first time in a long time, and the memories stopped overtaking the sensory input. He saw the strain, heavy as a weighted apron, laying on her. He needed her, and he knew she knew that, but he also knew that she understood you have to put on your own oxygen first. They hammer it into you every flight. Put on your own oxygen first. Before you help anyone else. Otherwise, you are both going to die.

“Okay,” he said simply. He reached up, touched her shoulder, stroked his thumb once along the collarbone he had always loved to nibble. “I’ll pack a bag.”

She helped him, unplugging his phone charger from beside the bed and setting it in his duffel. He reorganized while she went to grab his toiletries out of the bathroom. Two people moving in a fog, they assembled the tiny pieces of his life in takeout form. Jason tried not to think about it, tried not to think about how devastated Michael and Emma would be when they got home and he wasn’t there.

Tried not to realize that Michael and Emma were so used to him not being home that they wouldn’t think to be devastated unless Mom told them why.

He slung his bag over his shoulder and looked back at Alana, same way he had a hundred times before.

“I’ll call someone about the air conditioner,” he said. She nodded.

He closed the door behind him and felt his world end, not with a bang but a whimper.

**Author's Note:**

> The premiere of this show tugged at my heartstrings and demanded that I write this. I'll definitely be tuning in for week two.
> 
> The ending line is perhaps a poor use of the great T.S. Eliot, but it just felt so right. The wording is borrowed from his poem "The Hollow Men."


End file.
